Quoting: PleaseBanMeForMyOwnGood
Defence is a system thing. A 5 man cohesive unit works wonders on making any individual player better defensively. The Leafs under Babs were a high event team. Couple that with the garbage partners Rielly has played with and he gets the rep of being terrible defensively. He isn't, he's good and often great due to his crazy good skating. Parayko is better defensively sure, I won't argue that but the rest of Rielly's game is superior. I would love Parayko but moving on from Nylander and ever Leaf fan will be complaining that our forward depth is now crap. Which it would be greatly diminished. Meanwhile, Sandin, Liljegren, Dermott and Lehtonen will all either be decent or terrific in the rather near future. Patience is needed and rash decisions like moving an elite forward for a defenceman who will cost 8+ at the same time as Rielly will not help us.
let's just assume STL would agree to the deal (spoiler alert they wouldn')
It's really not that hard to understand why the Leafs just wouldn't have much trouble replacing WIlly, reason being that no other team in the league spends 38 millions on 4 forwards. I wouldn't complain about such a big four if two of them were D-men.
Now, you D wuld look like:
Mo(plays PP and PK)-CP(plays PK and PP)
JM(plays PK)-Sandin(move Holl)
Dermott(plays PK)-Lehtonen
-move Andersen and get a cheaper G (Mrazek, Crawford are interesting options in such a scenario)
-sign Spezza to a league min deal
-Dermott to a 1 year,1,5 mil deal
-Mikeyev to a 2 year, 2 mil deal
-sign C.Smith and C.Crawford to 2 year deals with 3,75 mil AAVs
-sign Maroon to a cheap 1 year deal
Hyman-AM-Smith
Roberston-JT-Marner
Johnsson-AK-Soup
Engvall-Spezza-Maroon
I count a 240 ish goal potential here, which is 3 goals per game. Now, I didn't count the D, which would add at the very least 35 goals (I'd argue 45) and I went conservative on Robertson (I gave him 16 goals I think), on Hyman (I gave him 20)
I really can't see how such a team is worse than what we currently have. It's so obvious to me
As for the D being a system, uh, you don't say? The fact is that as it stands TOR has 2 top 4 d-men, Holl looking like a number 6 as soon as Muzzin gets injured, Dermott is still a number 5 while Lehtonen hasn't played a single NHL game before and you seem to see him as the best invention since sliced bread